The Bible but TTRPG
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How is each an every one of them a hit. Great consistency, 10/10 post
The Daniel in the Lions’ Den one could have had Daniel rolling a nat 20 animal handling check right as the DM warns him it’s not a good idea, that would have been even better.
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The parts about feeding poor people are parables. Those stories are metaphors for spiritual poverty. What Jesus fed the hungry was the bread of life, ie, the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t want you to actually feed people, he wants you to preach to them.
Everything else is literal, especially the parts where God created the Earth in its current form in six 24-hour days and decreed there were only two immutable biological genders.
(The prosperity gospel is a hell of a drug. It’s no wonder Trump follows it.)
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My favourite is the one with Moses coming down with the Big Book of Rules, direct from God. Then getting his pals to kill thousands of his followers for not following the Rules, which presumably they’ve never seen.
Levites: But doesn’t it say in the Rules…
Moses: KILL THEM ALL.
Exodus 32, verse 27
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I’ll point out that the “Jesus and the fig tree” story is a parable. It’s made fun of a lot, but it’s a vicious lesson by someone who was very theatrical in their teaching style. The fig tree is Israel, who were expected by their god to always be in season and ready for their messiah. But when Jesus arrived, they were not in season, and so were cursed to never bear fruit again. It wasn’t an agricultural misunderstanding, it was a lesson and everything that surrounds it gives it context.
Thank you for this. Just passed that scene in The Chosen and was like “Huh. That seemed very odd!”
I really liked your contextual explanation.
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There is a convenience store I stop at which has a self help / religious book rack. On it, there is a copy of “The Action Bible”, and, given it’s cover, I assume this is the DMG for OPs campaign.
There’s also a Manga Bible, which is a pretty rad artistic interpretation as well.
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I think the story is only part of specific mysticist beliefs within the Abrahamic religions and not in any of the main texts
GM: Ask, and it shall be given unto you.
Solomon: I just wanna flip through that collection of splatbooks you’ve got back there.
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when your players are wild but know how to make memorable stories
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I’ll point out that the “Jesus and the fig tree” story is a parable. It’s made fun of a lot, but it’s a vicious lesson by someone who was very theatrical in their teaching style. The fig tree is Israel, who were expected by their god to always be in season and ready for their messiah. But when Jesus arrived, they were not in season, and so were cursed to never bear fruit again. It wasn’t an agricultural misunderstanding, it was a lesson and everything that surrounds it gives it context.
Jesus: curses random tree
Followers: Jesus, is there a problem? You can tell us directly.
Jesus: No, everything is fine *sulks*
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DM: Not that one, Job: I have a special d20 just for you!
Looks like a d10 to me o lord.
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There’s also a Manga Bible, which is a pretty rad artistic interpretation as well.
I mean, I feel like making Jesus a samurai is as authentic to history as making him a blond white dude.
Also, wandering the countryside, helping out the peasants and tweaking the nose of the establishment, gathering a crew of like-minded friends/followers, and culminating in an act of self-sacrifice which results in the protagonist’s willing death? I can easily see how someone could imagine, “what if Jesus, but ronin?”.
Shit. Im gonna end up buying one or both of these at some point…
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My favourite is the one with Moses coming down with the Big Book of Rules, direct from God. Then getting his pals to kill thousands of his followers for not following the Rules, which presumably they’ve never seen.
Levites: But doesn’t it say in the Rules…
Moses: KILL THEM ALL.
Exodus 32, verse 27
Also, at least two of the rules are basically just “my god is better than your god”
Getting genocided and wondering who the fuck Yahweh is
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The ending of that Daniel story is definitely something.
At the king’s command, the men who had falsely accused Daniel were brought in and thrown into the lions’ den, along with their wives and children. And before they reached the floor of the den, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones.
Why did I hear the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme in my head after reading this lol
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The story of Elisha and the boys deserves to be “nitpicked” as well. I haven’t checked for myself, but from what I understand most secular and non-secular scholars agree that the Hebrew term includes babies all the way to “boys” who are in their twenties. This makes better sense of how the term is used in other passages and of why Elisha would encounter 42 of them (which only counts those who were mauled) just hanging out in the countryside.
good thing the context tells us it was little boys
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Also, at least two of the rules are basically just “my god is better than your god”
Getting genocided and wondering who the fuck Yahweh is
The first rule is “Stop worshiping fake gods, you’re making the real god angry” and the second is “Stop just making up new gods from scratch. We’re monotheists. Fucking act like it.” The third, incidentally, is often interpreted to mean “Stop saying my name as a swear word” but is more traditionally understood to mean “Stop claiming you’re me or that you’re speaking in my name”… which is fucking wild considering everything in the books that follow.
Getting genocided and wondering who the fuck Yahweh is
It’s not like they didn’t know who Yahweh was. They were Jews fleeing Egypt precisely because they held a faith that contradicted the Egyptian high priesthood. You have to go back to the context of the story and recognize Moses only goes up the mountain because he’s completely losing control of the refugees he’s leading. They’re hungry, they’re lost, they have no direction or purpose anymore, and the cohesion of the society is falling apart.
So Moses goes up a hill and says “Okay, God, you got us this far. Now what?” And God sets down commandments. Then Moses returns down the hill and announces “I’ve got new instructions” and a bunch of the refugees say “Fuck no, we hate Yahweh now. We’re going to worship this big bronze bull and steal and rape and murder one another and you can’t stop us”.
And then there’s basically a mini-civil war in the refugee camp that ends (like so many civil wars do) in a genocide of the losing side.
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The first rule is “Stop worshiping fake gods, you’re making the real god angry” and the second is “Stop just making up new gods from scratch. We’re monotheists. Fucking act like it.” The third, incidentally, is often interpreted to mean “Stop saying my name as a swear word” but is more traditionally understood to mean “Stop claiming you’re me or that you’re speaking in my name”… which is fucking wild considering everything in the books that follow.
Getting genocided and wondering who the fuck Yahweh is
It’s not like they didn’t know who Yahweh was. They were Jews fleeing Egypt precisely because they held a faith that contradicted the Egyptian high priesthood. You have to go back to the context of the story and recognize Moses only goes up the mountain because he’s completely losing control of the refugees he’s leading. They’re hungry, they’re lost, they have no direction or purpose anymore, and the cohesion of the society is falling apart.
So Moses goes up a hill and says “Okay, God, you got us this far. Now what?” And God sets down commandments. Then Moses returns down the hill and announces “I’ve got new instructions” and a bunch of the refugees say “Fuck no, we hate Yahweh now. We’re going to worship this big bronze bull and steal and rape and murder one another and you can’t stop us”.
And then there’s basically a mini-civil war in the refugee camp that ends (like so many civil wars do) in a genocide of the losing side.
My friend, they weren’t monotheists at that point. There were all sorts of gods and Yahweh was just one of them.
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I always link 2 Kings 2 to The Apocalypse Players - A Christmas Inheritance. If you enjoy a Call of Cthulu adventure, I highly recommend it.
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Almost everything in there is a parable. It’s a cultural thing, because stories were only worth preserving as a lesson. The concept of preserving objective reality for its own sake is a very modern and recent ideology. It would have been seen as madness by ancient peoples.
It would’ve been madness in that region at that time. The Romans were writing entire books on natural history and that’s not even getting into something like the lost works on the Etruscan civilization. Recording things in that way fell out of favor with the Jewish people at that time due to centuries of rather brutal occupation requiring a certain level of obfuscation. Though I will say that objectivism wasn’t a concept at that point, the Garlic Wars is as much an account as it is propaganda by Caesar.
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Also, in the Apocrypha, childhood Jesus turned a kid he didn’t like into a tree. Quite possibly… a fig tree.
Jesus:i cast curse
DM: roll to hit
Jesus: nevermind i cast true polymorph
DM: at?
Jesus: that pesky SOB over there
DM: the eight year old?
Jesus: well now he’s a fig tree.
DM: Jesus, dude…
Jesus: I cast curse on the tree
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The first rule is “Stop worshiping fake gods, you’re making the real god angry” and the second is “Stop just making up new gods from scratch. We’re monotheists. Fucking act like it.” The third, incidentally, is often interpreted to mean “Stop saying my name as a swear word” but is more traditionally understood to mean “Stop claiming you’re me or that you’re speaking in my name”… which is fucking wild considering everything in the books that follow.
Getting genocided and wondering who the fuck Yahweh is
It’s not like they didn’t know who Yahweh was. They were Jews fleeing Egypt precisely because they held a faith that contradicted the Egyptian high priesthood. You have to go back to the context of the story and recognize Moses only goes up the mountain because he’s completely losing control of the refugees he’s leading. They’re hungry, they’re lost, they have no direction or purpose anymore, and the cohesion of the society is falling apart.
So Moses goes up a hill and says “Okay, God, you got us this far. Now what?” And God sets down commandments. Then Moses returns down the hill and announces “I’ve got new instructions” and a bunch of the refugees say “Fuck no, we hate Yahweh now. We’re going to worship this big bronze bull and steal and rape and murder one another and you can’t stop us”.
And then there’s basically a mini-civil war in the refugee camp that ends (like so many civil wars do) in a genocide of the losing side.
It’s less to stop worshipping fake gods, or asserting they’re monotheistic, it’s a directive to stop saying any God is “better” than Yahweh. At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety, and eventually that started to include taking attributes from the other deity’s in the pantheon, and eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels. Lesser devine entities strictly below Yahweh. Add in a couple centuries of linguistic drift and religious practice and you’ve got yahwehs name being replaced with “the LORD” in many places to avoid invoking the special power of names, and his name becoming your word for deity, making translation an absolute mess.
It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief. At the time it was and they only thought one god was worthy of worship. -
It’s less to stop worshipping fake gods, or asserting they’re monotheistic, it’s a directive to stop saying any God is “better” than Yahweh. At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety, and eventually that started to include taking attributes from the other deity’s in the pantheon, and eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels. Lesser devine entities strictly below Yahweh. Add in a couple centuries of linguistic drift and religious practice and you’ve got yahwehs name being replaced with “the LORD” in many places to avoid invoking the special power of names, and his name becoming your word for deity, making translation an absolute mess.
It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief. At the time it was and they only thought one god was worthy of worship.At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety
Apparently the real old school Jews believes that Yahweh had a wife, who was a kind of fertility goddess. And subsequent iterations of the religion simply removed her from cannon.
eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels
That’s more New Age retconning of the Old Testament. Old Israeli Yahweh existed for a population that had no idea how big the world was. They literally just new this slice of the Mediterranean and the neighboring tribes. Even into the Roman era, knowledge of the outside world was third and forth hand, often translated through multiple tongues. It isn’t that Israelis thought foreign gods were demons, its that they don’t recognize these religions as “legitimate”. At its heart, Yahweh really was the One True God in the sense that no other gods existed.
It’s like the old joke about Atheists only believing in one less God than everyone else.
Prohibitions on idols and putting other gods ahead of Yahweh were meta-textual arguments against breaking the law by claiming “Well, my own personal Yahweh+ said disrespecting my parents and coveting my neighbors slaves is cool, aktuly”. We’ve got one god. It’s Yahweh. These are his rules. You can’t claim there’s a bigger better god with a different set of rules and use that as an excuse to break the existing code.
It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief.
It’s removing the social construct of religion from the text. The point of the rule is to preempt anyone from introducing “Ten Commands: 2 - Bigger God’s Better Rules”. Sort of the equivalent of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
Because so much of what all this was about was governing human behavior, with the expectation that properly behaved people resulted in elimination of human suffering.
Incidentally, its why Jesus’s New Covenant was so hotly contested by existing Jewish faithful. This new messiah wasn’t the first one to try to overturn the old rule. At the same time, the old laws having grown so stagnant and the institutions so corrupted by Roman occupation, there was an understanding that the old codex needed to be refreshed and rewritten. “The Messiah” was, in function, a godly ordained designate who could rewrite the laws. And everyone was supposed to wait around for his arrival, because his new rules would fix the bugs in the old ones.
But if you don’t like the new guy’s rules, you say he’s a fake. You blame him for the public’s suffering. And you politely ask your Roman friends in Jerusalem to have him executed.
